write a short analysis eaasy

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For this essay, you may revise your first analytical paper OR choose another poem to analyze carefully. Your paper must not be longer than 834 words (no longer than my attached analysis of Tretheway's poem "Monument").

Make your claim clear and focused. Support your claim with specific evidence from the text. If you need to bounce any ideas off of me, email me at cgoodwin@cca.edu

I am happy to go back and forth with you this way in order to get the claim and evidence working together.

I am also attaching a few pages from the Diana Hacker text that address the conventions of analytical writing.

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Caroline Goodwin Professor Caroline Goodwin Writing 2: Seeing Nature 9/27/18 Short(er) Analytical Paper ! Natasha Tretheway’s free verse poem “Monument” uses extended metaphor to explore the human experiences of forgetting, feeling lost, regret, and surrender. The poem begins with an image of busy ants and ends with the line “a red and humming swarm” (line 24). Within the poem itself, the reader is asked to consider the experience of watching ants move in front of the speaker’s house, and the specific thoughts and feelings that watching the ants brings to the speaker. Then, the speaker visits her mother’s grave and watches more ants there. At the end of the poem, the ants represent the speaker’s deep feelings of regret, becoming a “blister on my heart” (line 23). ! The first parallel between human experience and the ants occurs in the second stanza with the line “like everything I’ve forgotten--disappear” (line 5). Here, the speaker is comparing “them” (the ants) to “everything I’ve forgotten.” This is a direct comparison; the “weaving” ants (line 2) are busy doing their work, which is “subterranean” (line 6). The underground nature of the ants’ work is being compared to the human experience of forgetting. Perhaps it is human to forget things, perhaps when we forget we are just being human, much like the ants are just being ants as they weave and emerge and build and disappear. When we forget things, our thoughts go underground and are no longer apparent to us. They are hidden, like the world built by ants under the soil. ! Also in the second stanza, the speaker reveals a scene that occurs in the cemetery “last June”, when the speaker “circled, lost--” (line 8). Here, we see a human being circling through grass, searching for her mother’s grave. This is another direct link to the ants, because the speaker is in the “weeds and grass grown up all around” (line 9). She is moving through the world much like an ant might when an ant is searching for food. She is lost but determined to find what she’s looking for, and the reader gets the sense that she will meet her goal in spite of the fact that the landscape is “blurred and waving” (line 9). ! The speaker reaches her mother’s grave in the third stanza and discovers yet more ants in this setting. These ants are “like arteries” (line 12) at the mother’s “untended plot” (line 13). Here, we understand that the speaker does not know the exact location of her mother’s grave and has not been a dutiful daughter. She has not visited the grave and has not tended the plot. These facts are likely to bring a sense of regret to the speaker, and the ants are described as “a rash on the grass” (line 15). This rash is an unpleasant image that suggests the discomfort of the speaker as she watches Nature’s process in the cemetery. In spite of her discomfort, the speaker remains at the grave for a long time as the ants pile the soil before her like an offering. Here, there is a sense of regret felt by the speaker, the sense of loss and sadness at the fact that she cannot go back and make up for lost time. Although we do not get a specific image of the speaker’s mother, we do get the sense that the mother was loved and is missed. ! The final image is one of complete surrender to the process of Nature and death, when the speaker finally asserts that she’s tried “not to begrudge them // their industry” (lines 20 & 21). Here, she admits directly to her feelings of regret. She becomes even more honest with the reader and boldly asserts that she feels badly about her own lack of “industry”. The ants are a straightforward “reminder” (line 21). They are a glaring truth, a fact of life. They remind us that human beings forget things, neglect their loved ones, and are powerless in the face of Nature’s final process, which is death. The speaker cannot escape the harshness of the image of the ants, as her final statement begins with “Even now,” (line 22). The experience of watching ants is one that stays with the speaker through time. “Even now”, perhaps even years later, at the writing of the poem, the ants at her mother’s grave and the ants at her front steps haunt the speaker. By the end of the poem, the metaphor has been fully extended and the ants have become “a blister on my heart, / a red and humming swarm” (line 24). The blister, like the rash, is highly unpleasant. However, the “red and humming swarm” is lively and almost positive, which adds complexity to the poem’s conclusion. This image, the metaphor of the ants, contains the processes of both life and death at the same time. It is not simple. Like the human being, like the city built by ants, it is layered and complex. ! ! ! DEVORAH MAJOR sign post colored water quarter water purple water sugar still water deep water salt water river clear water ice water rain water hailing break water hard water white water drown
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Anonymous
Just what I needed…Fantastic!

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